Categories

As discussed in last week’s post, I’m interested in the gendering and sexing of material culture. However, beyond twentieth- and twenty-first-century marketing and commodification, how has this process worked? How can the shape, movement and utility embodied by an object itself suggest gender and sexuality?

As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich illustrates in “Furniture as Social History: Gender, Property, and Memory in the Decorative Arts” in American Furniture (edited by Luke Beckerdite and William N. Hosley) – “to a twentieth-century eye, the graceful curves of a cabriole chair leg might appear ‘feminine,’ a massive chest with stubby bracket feet, ‘masculine.’ In the colonial world, the gender attributions were probably reversed. In both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a well-formed leg was one of the defining attributes of an upper-class male” (47). In other words, because constructs of gender and sexuality are fluid, subject to change, and vary throughout time and place, material culture (much like other primary sources) cannot be read through a presentist lens – or a Eurocentric one, for that matter. The elements of a single item – its materials, composition, production and consumption – can be and have been gendered and sexed in a variety of contexts.

For example, Ulrich quotes Claudia Kidwell in “Gender Symbols or Fashionable Details?” (126), her description of a green- and yellow-clad individual with “sloping shoulders, a padded chest, and a narrow, cinched waist … flared over the hips into a full skirt” – that of a woman’s dress or a man’s coat. In turn, Ulrichs argues that “an ‘hourglass’ figure, then, is not an eternally feminine symbol, nor do ruffles, flowered fabrics, or satins belong exclusively to women” (42). If shapes, textures, colors or patterns (through sight and touch) can be arbitrarily assigned gender and sexuality in a vacuum, how are they experienced in a given space? Particularly, how are they lived or embodied – through taste, sound or movement?
Ulrich claims that “gender codes are best conveyed in action” (51). Posture, gesture, stride, rest and reaction are the means through which sexuality and gender expression/presentation can be conveyed through movement – or, are motions to which sexuality and gender can be ascribed. Therefore, how does material culture like furniture suggest motion – what is expected of users, what uses the object contains, how users’ motions are influenced by its presence in a space, etc.? Indeed, material culture is relational. What items are present in the same space, nearest each other, or used in tandem?As Kenneth Ames outlines in Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture, how food and its consumption was conceived of by middle- and upper-class Victorian families is evinced in nineteenth-century dining room furniture (44). Everything from sensuality and pleasure derived from eating, to the elaborate etiquette and violent customs associated with meal preparation are illustrated in the crafting of statuary and carvings (68). The contrast between “masculine” sideboards – depicting the trappings of manhood through hunting elements and wild animals (73-74) – and “feminine” conceptions of mealtime – a women-led ritual of service, intimacy and abundance (88) – cast the dining room as a site of gendered power dynamics and sexual tension.Given the construction of material culture, its arrangement in a given space – how are people associated with it, how do their bodies navigate or use it, and how is it a reflection of their lives and contexts? For example, as Dayna M. Pilgrim observes in “Masters of a Craft: Philadelphia’s Black Public Waiters, 1820-50,” foodways scholars neglect the connection between eating culture and service work, women’s history scholars focus domestic labor among immigrant and native-born whites, and material culture scholars emphasize bourgeoisie experience and aesthetics in a static setting. Instead, Pilgrim’s interdisciplinary research examines the experiences of Black male public waiters in dining spaces (271). Rules of behavior extended to all five senses and “shaped the performance that both diners and service staff enacted” in a space ridden with bourgeoisie material culture (277). The aesthetics of a waiter’s costume, the quiet movement of his shoes, the calm confidence of his mannerisms and handling of utensils, near soundlessness and avoidance of touch each symbolized race, class and gender dynamics. The social and cultural expectations of the context were demonstrated through the uses of material culture, as well as its embodiment.

It’s a bright red children’s coat dress from 1884, with a tan lace cape collar. I picked it from Drexel University’s Robert and Penny Fox Historic Costume Collection, an archive made up of roughly 14,000 articles of clothing, accessories, and other objects related to fashion. I’ll be diving deep into the life of this little red coat, seeing what it can tell me about Philadelphia’s history as a manufacturing and retail giant throughout the 19th century.

I was admittedly wary when I first found out we’d be working with objects relating to fashion. Outside of the occasional watch of Project Runway, I know nothing about fashion. But visiting the collection was thrilling: in some ways, clothing seems like one of the most personal material objects we have. Observing a 19th century dress- all the unfamiliar straps clasps- you could easily imagine the person who once fit inside, and suddenly the dull, black-and-white images of 19th century Philadelphia in my head became filled with vibrant color.

I’m more than a little excited now to dive into my piece, and my head is already swimming with questions. Knowing so little about fashion and thinking about taking on this fashionable piece of history feels daunting- where do I even begin?

According to most Material Culturalist, with a good old fashioned description. E. McClung Fleming’s model for artifact study begins with simple identification- begin with ‘what even is this?’ an go from there. Fleming also suggests that historic information can play a role in identification, by providing background detail on the item’s maker, owner, or location of origin. Next, according to Fleming, would be a personal evaluation from the item’s perceiver, followed by a cultural analysis of the object and subsequent interpretation of the object’s significance today. Eight years after Fleming, Jules David Prown proposed another methodology, with some similar steps: begin with a physical, objective description, followed by a more subjective, emotional deduction.

My concern about starting from a purely factual, descriptive angle, has a lot to do with the idea of connoisseurship. In Charles Montgomery’s “Artifact Study A Proposed Model”, he aims to provide a practical guide to becoming a connoisseur. But even with his model, I am a fashion novice. How could my analysis and that of a connoisseur produce similar results? Even though Prown suggests that “the analyst must…guard against the intrusion of either subjective assumptions or conclusions derived from other experiences”, it seems to me that the true connoisseur could nonetheless come closer to objectivity by actually using their experience. Whereas a fashion expert, for instance, may be able to easily look at a dress and determine its material or see the craftsmanship (or lack thereof) behind its creation, my uninformed description can’t help but be subjective (ie. ‘the dress is made of silk’ vs. ‘well I don’t know what this is made out of it, but it seems soft!’)

As such, I think that perhaps a method that actually begins with subjective evaluation up front might better serve a fashion novice like me. To observe the object and record any sort of initial impression, no matter how subjective (this color seems bright! This looks like it’s made well! The garment seems heavy!). Going in without any background knowledge might actually create space for real revelations to occur.

By recording initial impressions- however uninformed they may be- I imagine lines of inquiry would be created that could help guide and order the research. Why does that color seem so bright to me? Does that mean it is in good condition or has it still faded from its original shade? Was that kind of coloring common for children’s clothes of the period or was it considered garish? What can perception of color in clothing tell us about the time? These sorts of questions would help inspire a deeper dive into the object and begin to peel away at its cultural significance. I imagine this might require the help of a connoisseur to really start to notice the object’s intricacies.

Gathering relevant historical data, which seems to all be part of Fleming’s first descriptive step, would come next, inspired by the questions produced from the perceiver’s first impressions. In his article, Montgomery notes an obscure English law related to textile printing that, once known, helped precisely date many of the objects made during that period. This kind of historical knowledge on the background of the item would hopefully begin to answer many of the analyst’s initial questions. I’m lucky that my object has both a tag for the retailer (with an address) and a name tag inside. This will make a fantastic entry point for researching the historic context of my item.

In a near reversal of Fleming and Prown’s ideas, a factual description would come close to last in my methodology. Putting together both the initial ‘uninformed’ observation with the historic context gathered through research, the analyst could begin to assemble a comprehensive description of the object, including everything that has been learned about material, color, style, craft, etc.

The last step in my methodology would be the cultural analysis and interpretation of significance. Especially for someone who lacks knowledge in that particular item, I don’t believe a full cultural analysis would be possible until the full background of an item is really explored. But finally, armed with the answers to why this was made, for who, by who, why does it look the way it does- and all the other questions you began with- can you ask: and what does it all mean?

I’m excited about diving into my object, and I think this method is helpful in creating a place to start for the uninitiated. Even Jules Prown admitted that “deductions almost invariable creep into the initial description,” (9) so why not lean into it? In many ways, all historical inquiry is about following your gut impressions about something that feels wrong, misunderstood, or simply left out, and that gut feeling helps you to know what questions to ask.

Numbers scare me. I’m not one of those humanities students who says they hate math just because, but I’m not used to seeing a ton of numerals in the type of works I like to read. While it may be an inaccurate perception, when I start seeing numbers my “this piece is decentering human actors!” alarm goes off. Numbers make me think of the longue durée. I flash back to reading Fernand Braudel’s meticulous descriptions of Mediterranean geographic features, and his related silencing of, you know, people.

Material culture should help reveal more information about people. After all, clothes aren’t superficial, because people aren’t! But when a piece goes into a hyper-detailed look at the physicality of the clothing, my alarm starts to go off. Where is the humanity in 10in x 5in?

Reading Joan Severa and Merrill Horswill’s piece, “Costume as Material Culture,” didn’t help. The structured layout of their methodology, and then their equally structured analysis of three individual dresses, made me feel like I was reading a lab report. In their introduction, the authors explained their belief that analyzing clothes can reveal information about a culture (53). I’m with them there. But the piece was ultimately not about people, or even learning new information about a culture. The authors did “deduce” some information about the women who may have worn the dresses, but their overall point was modeling a methodology to extract information from clothing that is already “representing any culture well-known to the researcher” (64). Their measurements didn’t really teach me how to use clothes to learn about people, but rather how to use people to learn about clothes. I’m much more interested in the other way around.

I found images from this ad campaign here. I have some philosophical issues with the slogan.

My mind started to open thanks to Valerie Steele and her explanation for the importance of tedious measuring in her piece, “A Museum of Fashion is More than Just a Clothes Bag.” Steele shared that her experience of measuring dozens of corsets led her “to questions whether the proverbial 16-inch waist was at all typical of the nineteenth century” (332). Here I have been convinced of the value of measuring! Through this mass effort Steele was able to learn something new about clothing styles in the nineteenth century, revealing information about culture, and, in turn, people. Though, this is from measuring dozens of corsets. What helpful, personal information comes from measuring just one?*

Then, in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects the historian did exactly what the title says. This lovely piece grounds its analysis in the differences between a mother and daughter’s field hockey suits from different eras at Radcliffe College. Ulrich observes that the differences between the two outfits “exemplifies a crucial transition in women’s clothing and education in the early decades of the twentieth century” (67). In this case, including a close look at the suits’ features helped contextualize differences in perceptions of womanhood and sport between just two generations. Ulrich did include measurements of the mother’s suit, but I felt like I understood her observations about the different suits without the numbers. Other features she pointed out, like the bow on the more recent suit, plus the images were enough. In this instance, the measurements weren’t really helpful, but there was enough additional information about the wearers that the piece didn’t feel at all separate from humanity.

Beverly Lemire’s chapter, “Draping the body and dressing the home” concluded with the note, “textiles and clothing are among the most personal relics of the past” (99). And Lemire didn’t include any measurements! But, even without numbers, at times the role of people felt lost. For instance, she wrote about a cut along the side of a bed hanging. Lemire hypothesized about how and why the cut came to be. Ultimately, drawing on the theory of Arjun Appadurai, Lemire notes that the object’s imperfections encourage consideration of “the ways in which its ‘social life’ was shaped” (88-9). Now, this is a relatively small quibble. Lemire’s piece includes significant discussion of people. This quote, however, almost personifies the hanging, decentering the actual humans who owned, used, cut, or “socialized” with the hanging. Out of this quibble comes a bigger realization: humans can be decentered without the use of numbers! Finding the humanity in a piece isn’t about whether or not measurements are included. Instead, it rests much more on the analysis surrounding the measurements, like in the case of Ulrich.

It’s worth noting that I also read a chapter from Ulrich’s book, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. Like Lemire, in this work Ulrich uses almost no measurements. Homespun is intensely personal, as Ulrich details the lives of the women who made the pieces she highlights. Yet as the Lemire example revealed, even without measurements analysis can be impersonal. But Ulrich provides names, sometimes faces, and diary entries. She cares about the clothes, but only for what they reveal about people.

All of these readings included multiple assertions about the power of material culture to learn about the past. I agree. Sometimes, though, I can get lost in the details of an object and feel separated from the person, or peoples, cultures, etc. that made and adorned the object. With the right context and accompanying information, though, I shouldn’t be lost for long.

*Steele also brought up some interesting notes about the frequent critiques of fashion museums for being “musty” or “superficial” (334). The public historian in me wants to engage more with this idea because it brings up a lot of thoughts I have about corporate museums and the entertainment value of museums, but that feels like something for another blog post on another day.

In his chapter titled “Why We Need Things,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlines the meanings and relationships that humans imbue objects with when they choose to own or keep them. Whether “demonstrating the owner’s power,” “reveal[ing] the continuity of the self through time,” or “giv[ing] concrete evidence of one’s place in a social network,” material things contain great symbolic weight for humans as social creatures (23). In light of the readings on clothing and fashion for this week’s class, I keep thinking about how clothes perform a specific function that mixes all of these functions: clothes and fashion operate as a form of rhetoric. In Jennifer Price’s chapter on the controversy over bird hats, she describes how upper-class women spearheaded the movement against bird hats as a product of their understandings of a woman’s domestic moral power and their perceived status as the aesthetic and moralistic vanguard of polite society. As the arbiters of proper domestic and natural morality and stewardship, women used their rejection of bird hats to signify their place in a community of socially-minded women who could exert new avenues of force and power in social clubs. Similarly, Leslie Shannon Miller describes in her article on corsets how the constrictive nature of the garment inculcated an “aura of high morality and youthful discipline that went hand in hand with the message of physical youth,” creating a way for women to sartorially demonstrate their virtue (137). For both Price and Miller, women understood that clothing “was always meant to be seen and interpreted by others,” making fashion a non-verbal rhetorical strategy where women signaled their values, power, and status to themselves and society (L. Miller, 143).

This concept of clothing and fashion as rhetoric inspires concerns, nonetheless. Some of these concerns are described in Daniel Miller’s “Why Clothing is Not Superficial.” In the selection, Miller warns against the predominant “semiotic perspective” of material culture studies that views fashion as a superficial mask that signifies deeper truths, demonstrating how ideas of superficiality collapse in the cultural and social contexts of Trinidad, India, and London. While I agree with Miller’s critique of superficiality as artificially locating “truth” within a person rather on their clothing or around them, I do not think his examples disprove the semiotic perspective he mentions (18). Whether it is Trinidad’s “saga boys” or “galleying”, India’s saris, or London’s anxiety-prone fashion scene, these tangible materials signify broader cultural or social processes and norms. Outer clothing does not semiotically represent inner truths, but instead visible evidence highlights invisible societal forces. The different practices and meanings behind clothes in Trinidad coincide with a society “relatively egalitarian” that “prefers metaphors which suggest that people are to be defined by their current abilities and achievements” (20). The battles between saris and the shalwar makiz in India is representative of debates over gender and femininity (31). The anxiety-produced conformity of London is a visible manifestation of the “burden [on women]…to know for themselves what is they want and who they want to be” that came about through feminist empowerment (38). Superficiality should be done away with, but not concepts of clothing and fashion as visible signifiers of societal processes or norms.

Another concern that Miller only hits on is the fact that clothing can lie (13). The distance between rhetoric and reality can vary, and a few of the readings touch on this. While the sartorial abandonment of bird hats by upper-class women conveys the belief among late-nineteenth-century Americans that women were at the heart and center of misconducts against nature, Price also highlights how this rhetoric somewhat obfuscates the reality of the economic markets that rampantly hunted and killed these birds. With these tensions of rhetoric and reality in mind, can objects and material culture studies stand on their own or do they need to be supplemented with other traditional historical sources to fully check against these differences?

This course introduces students to the major themes, issues, and methods relevant to the study of material culture. While archeologists have long concerned themselves with the study of prehistoric objects, only within recent decades have scholars focused their attention on objects as historical evidence. We will consider the variety of ways in which scholars from diverse fields have sought to understand meaning from things and then seek specifically to understand how historians have applied those ideas to their own work.

Students enrolled in the spring 2019 Studies in American Material Culture will have the opportunity to apply their skills in a real curatorial world capacity. We are partnered with the Fox Historic Costume Collection at Drexel University’s Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. In light of this cooperative project, we will be particularly concerned this semester with the history of clothing and the history Philadelphia’s retail environment between 1840-1940, as well as with issues bearing on the practice of public history, specifically within museums and other exhibitionary contexts.